News AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 Review

[tennis2]

Man.... I had a crack at a $280 RX5700 at the start of 2020. The new cards are certainly better, but they're far above that level of price/performance. For instance, the RX6800 is 2x the cost, but only 60-70% faster....
Moreover, Comparing, say, the RX6800 to the RTX3070 in price/performance, AMD is almost completely negating any ray tracing performance differences. In that battle, the 3070 wins in my opinion, hands down.

 

[Flayed]

Yes although I'm assuming some of the price increase is due to much higher shipping costs from China due to the pandemic

 

[-Fran-]

I'll think about getting one when they go under $350.

Cheers!

 

[aalkjsdflkj]

Moreover, Comparing, say, the RX6800 to the RTX3070 in price/performance, AMD is almost completely negating any ray tracing performance differences. In that battle, the 3070 wins in my opinion, hands down.

Depending on what you're interested in, it seems like the 3070/6800 choice can be pretty easy. I don't play anything that uses RT, so it's really of no interest to me. But I do like to mod games with higher texture packs that often demand a lot of VRAM. For someone looking for the best rasterization performance and plenty of VRAM but who doesn't care about RT, the 6800 is a no-brainer. If you don't care about RT, the extra VRAM should also help keep cards from going obsolete in a couple of years. I have a feeling the 16 GB of VRAM will age extremely well on the AMD cards.

 

[Speedy_H05]

if I stream what would be the better buy?

 

[Chung Leong]

As someone with an EVGA 3080 FTW... who gives a <Mod Edit> about raytracing? I turn it off in CoD CW to get way better framerates at 4k. Raytracing isn't worth it. Yes it's beautiful, but hardly anything more than a marketing gimmick at this point. If you can get a 3080 or a 6800, enjoy your awesome video card!

A couple years from now the option to turn off RT will be gone. I just don't see game developers putting in the same level of effort supporting outdated hardware.

 

[Soaptrail]

Why does the color coding in the graphs change starting with GPU core clocks?

Why is the RX 5000 series in red and the RX 6000 in Blue?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

@JarredWaltonGPU while the graphs contain the fan speed, how was the noise on your test bench overall? Was it akin to the old reference designs or actually quiet for once.

It's comparable to other open air cards. Like, overclocking was the only time I really noticed or thought about fan noise, and I was intentionally pushing the fan speed much higher than normal. By default, the fans top out at 50% max RPM. I tweaked that to go 50% minimum at 50C and above, ramping up to 100% if the GPU hit 80C -- which it didn't come close to. Basically, look at the RPM values and you can see that the reference cards are pretty comparable to the RTX 3080.

still reading the article, but something I have been curious about for a long time. Why not offer Ray-Tracing as an add-in card? It seems mostly compute based, and SLI/Crossfire wouldn't be needed. Bandwidth between PCIe a problem?

The add-in board would have to have the same data as the GPU, so then it would need RAM and then it would still have to pass data back and forth. It would be a mess I think.

I own 200 games and ZERO of them have ray tracing.

I want ray tracing - but not until its hardware agnostic and implemented in everything. Im not buying an early generation of proprietary tech that only works on 10 or 15 games total. Thats silly. Keep working on it guys and maybe next or next next Gen will be worth considering Ray Tracing ability as a prime consideration.

DirectX Raytracing is "hardware agnostic" and so is VulkanRT. But games and demos can put in a hardware check that would cause them to reject certain GPUs. I don't think that will generally happen.

So Microsoft Flight Simulator has already fallen off of your benchmark list? That was on there for what? One CPU generation and half a GPU generation? Is this a joke Jarred or did I just miss it while skimming the article?

MS Flight Simulator is very much CPU limited at most resolutions other than 4K. Time constraints meant I had to decide what things I could test and which ones had to fall by the wayside for now. Plus, my benchmark sequence for MSFS changed at some point and I haven't bothered creating a new one. (The sequence has the autopilot coming in for a landing at my local airport. It used to land just fine on the runway, now for whatever reason it lands about 50 feet to the left of the runway. Probably doesn't really affect performance much, but it irritates me that the autopilot sucks. LOL)

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Why does the color coding in the graphs change starting with GPU core clocks?

Why is the RX 5000 series in red and the RX 6000 in Blue?

It's something I programmed into my charts. The power/temp/fan/clock charts are in a different spreadsheet, and the highlight color (because there are no min bars) is blue, AMD is red, and Nvidia is black. For the main gaming charts, AMD highlight is lighter read + lighter grey, non-highlight is darker red/grey. Nvidia is lighter blue/grey for highlight (the card in review), darker blue/grey for non-highlight.

 

[King_V]

A couple years from now the option to turn off RT will be gone. I just don't see game developers putting in the same level of effort supporting outdated hardware.

What on earth makes you think they'd force all users to use ray tracing, when no other video setting has been locked in and taken away from the user?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

What on earth makes you think they'd force all users to use ray tracing, when no other video setting has been locked in and taken away from the user?

Yeah, I think there may be a very limited number of games that require hardware ray tracing support, but it will be some time before that becomes the norm. Basically, look at how long it took for large numbers of games to ship with the requirement of hardware DX11/DX12 support. Ray tracing will probably take even longer, because budget and mainstream GPUs still aren't going to get high levels of RT performance for a while.

 

[Soaptrail]

Yeah, I think there may be a very limited number of games that require hardware ray tracing support, but it will be some time before that becomes the norm. Basically, look at how long it took for large numbers of games to ship with the requirement of hardware DX11/DX12 support. Ray tracing will probably take even longer, because budget and mainstream GPUs still aren't going to get high levels of RT performance for a while.

At least 10 years if it were to become mandatory, but that is a big if.

 

[Soaptrail]

It's something I programmed into my charts. The power/temp/fan/clock charts are in a different spreadsheet, and the highlight color (because there are no min bars) is blue, AMD is red, and Nvidia is black. For the main gaming charts, AMD highlight is lighter read + lighter grey, non-highlight is darker red/grey. Nvidia is lighter blue/grey for highlight (the card in review), darker blue/grey for non-highlight.

I would recommend using the same color scheme as the other graphs, I found it really hard to follow since my eyes were drawn to the colored bars and I don't think you want me gravitating to the RX 5000 series, right?

 

[RodroX]

Why does the color coding in the graphs change starting with GPU core clocks?

Why is the RX 5000 series in red and the RX 6000 in Blue?

I think this way is easier to spot the new hardware right away (in this case the new AMD GPUs). Those blue bars scream for attention.

 

[DonGato]

Well, unless you plan on staying on GTX 1000 or Radeon 5000 series seems like you are out of luck aren't you?

Besides, ray tracing IS hardware agnostic, is part of DX12, and with the arrival of these new cards you can activate it on either NVIDIA or AMD. If it weren't hardware agnostic, you would not be seeing this review using ray tracing on control, tomb raider, etc on an AMD Card if it was an NVIDIA proprietary tech (like DLSS is). Technically you can even activate it WITHOUT an accelerated ray tracing card if you want to see an slide show. Brings back memories of the first 3D accelerators from Rendition and 3dfx... good ol days.

Finally, with ray tracing now on both major consoles, you can bet it will be implemented on almost every major game from now on.

Common misunderstanding, DXR may be agnostic but RTX IS NOT. RTX is not just a fun name for their cards. it is an implementation based on DXR but is NOT the same thing. Not out of luck at all, im not a consumer zombie i can survive a whole generation between upgrades and live a happy life. I'll get ray tracing when its ready, or if my current card melts idc that much, if its on a card i get then yay if not then meh.

 

[DonGato]

Ray Tracing PSA:

DXR and RTX are not the same thing!
One is a proprietary technology.
If your game supports Direct X 12 ray tracing it will trace rays with AMD or Nvidia
If you game was developed for RTX alone it will ONLY trace rays with RTX cards.

RTX is NVIDIAs own implementation. and RTX cards SUPPORT DXR as well.

 

[renz496]

still reading the article, but something I have been curious about for a long time. Why not offer Ray-Tracing as an add-in card? It seems mostly compute based, and SLI/Crossfire wouldn't be needed. Bandwidth between PCIe a problem?

that will kill the adoption for user. 99% of gamer out there most likely not interested to buy this add in card. this in turn will going to effect developer interest to implement it in their games as well. for others it could be latency issue.

 

[Makaveli]

With games ever increasing in complexity the 128MB of infinity cache will age quickly. Its showing its limits at 4k now.

Anyone want the bet in 2 years, 6800XT will run slower than 3080 @1440p. Its a lot like Fury. It will age poorly due to limited (fast) memory.

I'm willing to bet donation money to favorite charity.

Would never take that bet as this is a wild assumption with nothing to back it.

And unless you have a crystal ball I would avoid making projections like this.

Sounds like something an NV fanboy would say.

 

[renz496]

Ray Tracing PSA:

DXR and RTX are not the same thing!
One is a proprietary technology.
If your game supports Direct X 12 ray tracing it will trace rays with AMD or Nvidia
If you game was developed for RTX alone it will ONLY trace rays with RTX cards.

RTX is NVIDIAs own implementation. and RTX cards SUPPORT DXR as well.

DXR is the open standard. RTX is nvidia implementation for DXR. the API can be open standard but hardware implementation will always be proprietary to every IHV. take tessellation as an example. it is part of direct x spec since DX11. but for hardware implementation both AMD and nvidia have their own way to do it. and it is proprietary to them. AMD have truform. while nvidia have their polymorph engine.

 

[spongiemaster]

Ray Tracing PSA:

DXR and RTX are not the same thing!
One is a proprietary technology.
If your game supports Direct X 12 ray tracing it will trace rays with AMD or Nvidia
If you game was developed for RTX alone it will ONLY trace rays with RTX cards.

RTX is NVIDIAs own implementation. and RTX cards SUPPORT DXR as well.

This is just factually wrong. RTX is Nvidia's marketing name for its hardware acceleration of DXR. There's no such thing as an RTX game. Any game utilizing RTX is a DXR game.

 

[renz496]

What on earth makes you think they'd force all users to use ray tracing, when no other video setting has been locked in and taken away from the user?

one of the idea of using RT is to replace all the baked effect in our games with more physically correct effect that can be done with RT. take this for example: shadow. right now for games that implementing shadow RT have the regular shadow that we always see and RT shadows. in the future game developer might end up using only RT shadows by default instead of using both like it is right now. it's like when game development start using FP32. some early games like half life 2 offer to run the game in FP16 or FP32 (and back then using FP32 will cut FPS by half with no visual difference at all) . from there we start seeing some mix usage but eventually all game end up being develop exclusively for FP32.

 

[renz496]

Would never take that bet as this is a wild assumption with nothing to back it.

And unless you have a crystal ball I would avoid making projections like this.

Sounds like something an NV fanboy would say.

still it is one of the possible explanation. remember AMD develop infinity cache to address the bandwidth issue of their architecture are having without relying on HBM. they said it will increase their effective bandwidth but it is still not the same as having the actual bandwidth. even AMD said that they are looking at it closely to see if they really can benefit from infinity cache going forward. if yes then they will improve the feature on RDNA 3.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Ray Tracing PSA:

DXR and RTX are not the same thing!
One is a proprietary technology.
If your game supports Direct X 12 ray tracing it will trace rays with AMD or Nvidia
If you game was developed for RTX alone it will ONLY trace rays with RTX cards.

RTX is NVIDIAs own implementation. and RTX cards SUPPORT DXR as well.

Please don't spread FUD. "RTX-only ray tracing" isn't really a thing -- just about all the games with ray tracing use a standard API.

The exception: Wolfenstein Youngblood, which used Nvidia's pre- VulkanRT extensions. (Technically, the game could be recompiled to use VulkanRT quite easily and it would work on AMD cards, but I don't think that has happened yet. Probably never will be at this point, because the game I don't think sold enough copies and there's little incentive to update it now. The RT patch came out before VulkanRT was finalized, and Khronos said it's mostly just a case of changing the function call names and recompiling.)

So, every major game with ray tracing right now runs on AMD's GPUs, because the games just use DirectX Raytracing and no proprietary extensions. The only 'game' I tried that didn't run at all on AMD's GPU was the Bright Memory Infinite benchmark, which appears to manually check for Nvidia hardware rather than checking for DXR capabilities -- Boundary benchmark doesn't have that problem and also uses Unreal Engine.

Now, DLSS is completely different. That's a proprietary Nvidia tech and requires Nvidia's Tensor cores. But there aren't any games that are written to use DirectX 12 with some hypothetical RTX extensions that I'm aware of. They're written to use DXR, and probably we'll see more using VulkanRT going forward (because of Sony PS5 console).

 

[Chung Leong]

What on earth makes you think they'd force all users to use ray tracing, when no other video setting has been locked in and taken away from the user?

Because it costs less money to do dynamic lighting and shadows?

 

[Warsaw]

sings All......I want.....for Christmas...... is a new......new....GPU......for Christmas......